Premier Kathleen Wynne plans to have the provincial legislature sit through much of July to get a throne speech and budget approved by her newly elected government, she said Friday in her first news conference after winning a majority Thursday night.

“I’m waiting for the easy day in political life,” she said. “This may be the closest to it.” Exactly. Her mandate stretches out before her. Nothing bad has happened in the past 12 hours. But some tricky manoeuvring is coming up soon.

Wynne is hoping to break with Queen’s Park’s ugly spring, in which every ordinary legislative activity was twisted into a political gimmick, either by an opposition party trying to weaken Wynne’s Liberals and push them toward an election, or by the Liberals trying to avert one.

An early casualty will be the political investigation into the gas-plants scandal, Wynne signalled.

The legislature has a standing committee on justice policy, which will be formed and charged again with reporting on who knew what, and who did what, when Dalton McGuinty’s people cancelled those two generating stations near Toronto before the 2011 election, at what turned out to be stunning expense to the people of Ontario. Wynne promised as much in the campaign and she promised it again Friday.

“I do believe we need to see that report and get that advice,” she said.

That means wrapping the job up. Before the election, the minority of Liberals on the committee had resorted to filibustering votes on whether to have more meetings and hear from more witnesses, while the opposition loaded up their lists of people they wanted to testify. Every day the committee met was a bad day for the Liberals, so the Liberals tried to keep it from meeting and the opposition tried to make it meet as much as possible. Now the Liberals will get to decide what the committee does, with only their consciences restricting them.

Including whether it still wants to hear from Laura Miller (McGuinty’s combative former deputy chief of staff, whose then-boss David Livingston is under police investigation for breach of trust) and Peter Faist (Miller’s boyfriend, and the man Livingston allegedly got to invade public computer systems in the hopes of erasing possibly embarrassing documents).

The honourable thing, if Wynne is serious about finding out exactly what happened and lancing the boil, would be to pare the witness lists down but make sure those two stay on it. We’ll learn a lot about how an untrammelled Wynne thinks by what she chooses to do with them — whether her break with McGuinty was genuine or mostly for show.

She’ll have to decide, too, whether to carry on with the lawsuit she launched against Progressive Conservatives Tim Hudak and Lisa MacLeod for claiming she might have overseen those document deletions.

She dodged a question about that Friday: “I’m always happy to debate facts. But when they’re false allegations, it’s unacceptable,” Wynne said, repeating the complaint her lawsuit rests on without answering whether it’s going to go ahead.

Both Hudak and MacLeod refused to back down before the campaign, and now Wynne’s in an awkward spot. She always said the lawsuit was about a principle, about setting a boundary for what sort of nastiness is acceptable in politics and what isn’t, and by that standard she has to keep the case going. Yet Hudak’s quitting as his party leader after a humiliating loss, and suing him, too, will both look petty and produce regular reminders of a scandal Wynne would surely rather talk about less rather than more.

Before the legislature sits again on July 2, Wynne also has to name a new cabinet, drawn from a bigger pool of MPPs. The composition of her last cabinet was partly about paying off debts from her leadership race, including her naming Charles Sousa her finance minister. Sousa’s a qualified former banker and Wynne has promised to reintroduce the budget he presented before the election, so it could be awkward to dump him and put somebody else’s name on the thing.

But there’s no time like right after winning a majority to do awkward things.

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